Scientists at FAU’s Harbor
Branch Oceanographic Institute are the First to
‘Unlock’ the Mystery of Creating High quality
Cultured Pearls from the Queen Conch

In their natural form, conch
pearls are among the rarest pearls in the world—it
takes about 10,000 queen conch to find one conch pearl
and only 1 in 100 of those is gem quality.

BOCA RATON, FL(November 4, 2009)– For more
than 25 years, all attempts at culturing pearls from the queen
conch (
Strombus gigas)have been unsuccessful—until now. For
the first time, novel and proprietary seeding techniques to produce
beaded (nucleated) and non-beaded cultured pearls from the queen
conch have been developed by scientists from Florida Atlantic
University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI).
With less than two years of research and experimentation, Drs.
Héctor Acosta-Salmón and Megan Davis, co-inventors,
have produced more than 200 cultured pearls using the techniques
they developed. Prior to this breakthrough, no high-quality queen
conch pearl had been cultured. This discovery opens up a unique
opportunity to introduce a new gem to the industry. This
significant accomplishment is comparable to that of the Japanese in
the 1920s when they commercially applied the original pearl culture
techniques developed for pearl oysters.

HBOI has been working with the Gemological Institute of America
(GIA) to conduct extensive laboratory testing of the queen conch
cultured pearls. In its independent analysis, GIA used techniques
that included conventional gemological examination, chemical
composition, spectroscopy, spectrometry and microscopy. HBOI and
GIA plan to jointly publish the results of these trials in an
upcoming issue of GIA’s scientific journal,
Gems & Gemology.

“This is
a significant development for the pearl industry, and we were
very excited to have the opportunity to closely examine these
unique conch cultured pearls in our laboratory,” said Tom
Moses, senior vice president of the GIA Laboratory and Research.
“Several of the pearls we examined are truly top-quality
gems. With the equipment and expertise available at the GIA
Laboratory, identification criteria are being compiled to
separate queen conch cultured pearls from their natural
counterparts.”

Previous
efforts to culture queen conch pearls were unsuccessful, probably
because of the animal’s sensitivity to traditional pearl
seeding techniques and its complex shell. The spiral shape of the
shell makes it virtually impossible to reach the gonad, one of
the pearl-forming portions in pearl oysters, without endangering
the animal’s life.

“Perhaps
the most significant outcome from our research is that the
technique we have developed does not require sacrificing the
conch in the process,” said Davis. “The 100 percent
survival rate of queen conch after seeding and the fact that it
will produce another pearl after the first pearl is harvested
will make this culturing process more efficient and
environmentally sustainable for commercial
application.”

Survival of the
animal is critical because commercial fishing has depleted the
once-abundant wild populations of queen conch, and they are now
considered a commercially threatened species in Florida and
throughout the Caribbean.

There are
basically two types of cultured pearls: nucleated (beaded) and
non-nucleated (non-beaded). Nucleated cultured pearls are
produced by inserting a piece of mantle tissue from a donor
mollusk and a nucleus, usually a spherical piece of shell, into
the body of a recipient mollusk. Non-nucleated pearls are
produced by grafting only a piece or pieces of mantle tissue, and
no bead is inserted.

“We used
two different seeding techniques to induce pearl formation in the
queen conch,” said Acosta-Salmón. “One was a
modification of the conventional technique used to produce
cultured pearls in freshwater mussels, and the other was a
modification of the conventional technique used in marine pearl
oysters.”

Conch pearls
are formed by concentric layers of fibrous crystals, and this
layering often produces the desired flame structure, which is
characteristic of conch pearls. The pearls have a porcelain
finish and luster like the interior of the conch shell, and come
in a wide variety and combination of colors including white, red,
pink, orange, yellow and brown. Queen conch pearls are measured
in carats like traditional gemstones.

The size of the
cultured pearls produced by Acosta-Salmón and Davis is
controlled by the size of the bead and the culture time.
The researchers have experimented with culture times from
six months to two years; longer culture times may produce larger
pearls. The queen conch is farmed in aquaculture tanks, and the
queen conch cultured pearls in the initial harvest were grown in
an aquaculture facility at HBOI. Queen conch achieve full size at
about three years and have a life span of up to 40 years.

The queen conch
is the largest molluscan gastropod of the six conch species found
in the shallow seagrass beds of Florida, the Bahamas, Bermuda,
the Caribbean Islands, and the northern coasts of Central and
South America.

To learn more about these queen conch cultured pearls, go to the
G&G eBrief electronic newsletter at
www.gia.edu/gandg.
For additional information, contact Jan Petri at 772-465-2400,
ext. 241

Héctor
Acosta-Salmón, Ph.D. –Dr.
Acosta-Salmón has been working in the fields of pearl
culture and pearl quality for more than 12 years. He has
conducted research with all the commercial species of pearl
oysters including the akoya, the black-lip, the silver-lip, and
the ‘mabe’ pearl oysters distributed in the Western
Pacific, and also with the rainbow-lip, and the Panamanian pearl
oysters from the Eastern Pacific. He focused on pearl oyster
broodstock management and pearl quality during his doctoral
studies at James Cook University in Australia. In 2006, he moved
to Florida where he served as a post-doctoral investigator at
HBOI bringing with him the pearl oyster culture technology which
he utilized during his post-doctoral studies and research. His
aim during his tenure with HBOI was to develop techniques to
produce queen conch cultured pearls. Dr. Acosta-Salmón
also served as an assistant research professor at HBOI until
2009, and is now associate scientist at Centro de Investigaciones
Biológicas del Noroeste in La Paz, B.C.S.,
Mexico.

Megan Davis, Ph.D.– Dr.
Davis has been working in aquaculture and marine science for 30
years. As co-founder of a commercial queen conch farm in the
Turks and Caicos Islands, she developed commercial culture of
conch from eggs to juveniles. She joined HBOI in 1996, and in
2000, she led an effort that succeeded in inducing egg laying in
tank-reared conch, effectively closing the entire life cycle of
the queen conch for use in aquaculture. She is the director for
aquaculture and stock enhancement at HBOI. Her aquaculture
skills with queen conch provided the necessary technology for the
successful culture of queen conch pearls. Her other interests are
to develop aquaculture species for food, stock enhancement and to
ease fishing pressure on wild stocks. She actively works on
projects with goals to produce aquaculture species and systems
that are cost effective, energy efficient and environmentally
sustainable. She has been involved in several aquaculture
retraining and education outreach programs to assist individuals
in advancing the aquaculture industry. Her primary research areas
are aquaculture of queen conch, spiny lobsters and marine
fish.

About Harbor Branch Oceanographic
Institute:

Harbor
Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University
is a research institute dedicated to exploration, innovation,
conservation, and education related to the oceans. Harbor
Branch was founded in 1971 as a private non-profit
organization. In December 2007, Harbor Branch joined Florida
Atlantic University.
The institute specializes in ocean
engineering, at-sea operations, drug discovery and
biotechnology from the oceans, coastal ecology and
conservation, marine mammal research and conservation,
aquaculture, and marine education. For more information,
visit
www.hboi.fau.edu.

About Florida Atlantic
University:

FloridaAtlantic
University opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public
university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than
28,000 undergraduate and graduate students on seven campuses.
Building on its rich tradition as a teaching university, with a
world-class faculty, FAU hosts ten colleges: College of
Architecture, Urban & Public Affairs, Dorothy F. Schmidt
College of Arts & Letters, the Charles E. Schmidt College of
Biomedical Science, the College of Business, the College of
Education, the College of Engineering & Computer
Science, the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, the Graduate
College, the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing and
theCharles E. Schmidt College of Science.